Columns

Gentle Reader, as you will recall, in last month’s column for Friday, the 25th, we raised the issue of the supposed over-population problem in the new jail.

In that column we posed certain questions, the answers to which we think it is critical that everyone, (especially the people who are going to have to foot the bill for any “corrective measures” that might be proposed, i.e. the Roane County taxpayers,) should have answered.

Last Sunday, I was at Hooters.
Yes, THAT Hooters.
Trust me, it’s not a place I ever aspired to be.
How I got there is a circuitous story, one involving three friends, a cascading creek and a winding dirt road through Cherokee National Forest.
It began innocently enough.

Stan (not his real name because he’s a bit embarrassed about what comes next), Russ (his real moniker; he’s unflappable) and I had planned to ride bicycles from the base of Little Citigo Creek most of the way up to Indian Boundary Lake.

In the past couple of years we have seen and heard many things from some of our Tea Party-type friends that have amazed us, but probably the most amazing thing yet was Marsha Blackburn’s complaint this past Sunday about the U.S. Senate not being in session on that day!

Miss Marsha is, as you no doubt know, one of the members of Congress from a district in Middle Tennessee, one of the strongholds of the Church of Christ.

We had always thought that that area was a member in good standing of the Bible Belt.

As long time readers of this column may recall, we dislike too early engagement in holidays.

For instance, there are already Halloween decorations which are beginning to look shop worn and disheveled, even though it is more than a month until we reach All Hallows Eve, and there are stores that have already put Christmas things on display, almost three months early, however, we have decided that the most apt introduction to this week’s column is from that Charles Dickens classic, “A Christmas Carol.”

Our friends of the Republican persuasion have not reprised their song about Democrats promoting “class warfare” for a while. It is likely that even they don’t have enough nerve, or what is called “Chutzpah” in the Yiddish language, when their own actions are nothing except class warfare, in which they have all the weapons of mass destruction, (including poison gas in the form of every exhalation emanating from their lungs when they utter almost any kind of public remark).

By LEE HAMILTON
Center on Congress
As Washington swirls with proposals, counter-proposals, and political brinksmanship in response to diplomatic efforts on Syria, the situation has a lot of people scratching their heads.

Well, gentle reader, we cannot help but wonder what has happened to our Tea Party folks.

As you will recall, the founders of this movement were the fiscal conservatives who felt that governments were wasting too much of our money. In fact, as you know, the Tea Party name is short for “Taxed Enough Already?”